From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Emotions are the brain's way of making us pay attention immediately to what is most important so that we can react as quickly as possible. In evolution, that meant 'survival' – the rustle in the bushes may be our next meal or may make us its next meal – something that we have to chase, or run away from – and in either case, we don't want to have to stop and think.
Sometimes it doesn't matter if the other side doesn't care about fairness; provided you do, you explain what's going on. Now it's arbitrary versus arbitrary versus principle versus arbitrary.
A child doesn't even question their situation- I was thrown into a situation and had to respond to it; if I needed food, I had to get food… If I needed shelter, I had to find shelter.
Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old.
If I finish a marathon at 4.02 (which is the fastest I've ever ran a marathon in my life), what is the first thing that occurs to me? Oh that was so close to 3.59, I wonder if I could do it. Then as soon as you imagine yourself crossing the line at 3.59 boom, you're in wonderhell because everything that you do, every time that you run you're like 'if I could just keep that up for 25 more miles that could be 3.59'. So as soon as you see it, you can't unsee it.
People play Farmville, they don't play Zynga! In the same sense, people don't go to Paramount movies, they go to see Mission Impossible.
We must not only use the emotional part of exploration, but also the state of mind of exploration which encourages us to get out of our bad habits, beliefs, everything we know, our comfort zone, and even our way of thinking. The mindset of exploration encourages us to find new solutions.
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
At its best, music is empathic… we can relate to it… it moves us and makes us feel connected. The best music for me captures a zeitgeist, captures something of the time and something of what we feel.
Mind, body, and spirit have to come together, and I think when you have early trauma that gets disrupted, your mind gets separated from your body. Your mind becomes this sort of distracted, dissociated place to go when this alarm in your body—if your parents are screaming at each other or your dad's an alcoholic—there's only so much a child can take.
I once got a troll who read something about me and tweeted, 'The only thing I want to read about you is your obituary...' my comeback, 'well, at least I'll get one mate!' – that accepts his position (that he only wants to read my obituary) and turns it back at him without aggression. That's how you have to do it, that's the basic rule.
Most people think of optimism as a celebration, but for us optimism is a courageous choice to remain grittily determined to find solutions in a timely and collaborative way. We have no choice but to address climate change, and thus we have no choice but to remain stubbornly optimistic.